Category: programming
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JetBrains Mono: Equal or Not
I just installed the JetBrains Mono font. We programmers need monospaced fonts, and this is a very nice one. It comes installed with recent versions of JetBrains’s IDEs. My copy of IntelliJ was not recent, it turned out.
Anyway, the most interesting thing is ligatures for programmers. Take a look at this:
You see that “not equals” sign? The crossed-out equals that we were taught to write back in secondary school? That’s not a character in any normal ASCII typeface. Plus, this is Java: even if it were a character (there is a Unicode character for that symbol), it’s not part of the language. The compiler wouldn’t recognise it.
What that actually is is the standard not-equals of C-based languages: !=. But the font has detected it and replaced it with the more attractive and traditional symbol.
It’s a setting you can disable, and I’m not sure I’ll keep it that way, but it’s impressive and unusual.
REPL Reply
:
A REPL or read eval print loop is what we called an interactive prompt back in the day when I learnt Python and Ruby.
He goes on to say:
For a REPL to make sense you need to be able to test small chunks of code. Like this function or this expression; or my typical thing, “would this work” or how the fuck was that syntax again?
I’ve sometimes found that they have a downside. When you are looking for code examples, then if a language has a REPL, very often the examples show the use of a feature in the REPL. Which may be fine, but is not so helpful if you’re trying to find out how to construct a class or a function.
Which point, to be fair, Hjertnes does address:
In other words, if your language require a lot of “foreplay” to run code, like declaring a namespace and a class etc (I’m looking at you Java and C#) it will probably not be the right thing. But if you can evaluate code without much fuss it is.
Java is supposed to be getting one soon, I believe, if it’s not already in version 9.
They Took Something Very Weird and Made It More Usable
Good piece by Paul Ford, writing at Bloomberg on Microsoft buying GitHub:
[GitHub] has a well-designed web interface. If you don’t think that’s worth $7.5 billion, you’ve never read the git manual.
He means the man pages, I assume.
GitHub is “the central repository for decentralized (sic) code archives,” which is mildly amusing. But this:
In the pre-git era, you updated your software annually and sent customers floppy disks. But if you’re running a big software platform, you might update your servers constantly—many times a day or every 20 minutes.
is a bit over the top. There were a lot of changes between sending out floppies and continuous deployment.
I question his (lack of) capitalisation. The command is git, all lower case. But if you’re talking about the application, you should spell it “Git”, with the capital. I think so, anyway. You would write about “CVS”, even though the command was (is) cvs; and “Subversion,” with the command svn. But at least it’s not as annoying as people who write it in all-caps.
Lastly, when he says, “Computers are mercurial,” I’m assuming he’s wryly referencing what was once Git’s major rival in the distributed version-control space. Nicely deadpan, if so.
Tab Convert
That’s convert, with the stress on the first syllable. The noun, in other words. As in, “I am a tab convert.” A convert, that is, to using tabs for indentation of source code, instead of spaces.
A Background of Spaces
From the earliest time that I learned about the tabs vs spaces debate, I’ve been a spaces guy. This is at least partly because of the influence of my then-colleague Benjamin Geer. He has gone on to other, no doubt better, things, but he was probably the best programmer I’ve ever worked with. He introduced me to the idea that you should always use four spaces for indentation. The reason being that if you use tabs, people can have their editor’s tab size set to all sorts of different values, and it leads to source files not looking as you expect them to.
Whereas spaces are spaces: you can’t go wrong with a space (or four).
I’ve changed, though. I have become a convert, in my job, and maybe philosophically, to tabs.
Stack Overflow Survey
About a year ago there was a survey of developers on Stack Overflow. Among many questions, they asked about whether people used spaces or tabs. The detail that got most attention was that developers who use spaces were paid more on average than those who use tabs. I strongly suspect that correlation is not causation in this case, but it seemed noteworthy at the time.
More interesting to me was the fact that more people used tabs, at 42.9% against 37.8%. I was surprised: I thought spaces had won years ago. Though I often wondered (sometimes publicly, and I’m surprised to see that was only last year) why the default setting for Eclipse was tabs.
Maybe that default, and others like it, is part of the reason for the statistics. Most people don’t change defaults. On the other hand, surely developers are the kind of people who are most likely to change defaults?
Anyway, after the survey came out there were various posts about it, notably John Gruber, who said he was “a devout user of tabs”. OK, he’s not a developer these days, but there were others who are who said similar things. The one that struck me was one that I can’t locate now that said “tabs are semantic.” In other words, pressing the tab key means “indent here.” Four spaces means… four spaces? Could be an indentation, could be something else.
Everything Changes Imperially
So I was primed for the idea of switching to tabs, even though I still used spaces in my own projects. And then I started my new job at Imperial College. When I first started looking at the code, I quickly realised that it was indented with tabs throughout. I checked with my co-worker who is the main contributor. He didn’t mind, but they had always used tabs.
Obviously I didn’t want to introduce a mixture. That’s what really messes up the display of code in different editors. You have to be consistent within a project. So if I were to change the project to spaces I would have to change every file. That was an unnecessary step; and per the above, I was primed to use tabs. They’re semantic, after all.
I switched my IDE to indent using tabs, with the tab-stop value set to 4. And so we proceed, tabbing away merrily.
So far I prefer it this way.
Imperial Adventures
Just over a month ago I posted a brief note about job news, saying that more details would be forthcoming. I was, as I said then, just waiting for some paperwork.
It took longer than I expected to get that paperwork sorted out, but I received and returned the contract yesterday afternoon. On Monday I start work at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the School of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College.
That’s quite a mouthful, but in short I’ll be working on programming something called the The Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF), which is an open-source tool for studying health statistics.
I’m neither a medical researcher nor a statistician, but I am a programmer (or a software engineer, if you want to be fancy). Our job is to understand the needs of someone — usually referred to as “the business,” but I’m guessing that will be different in my new job — and translate those needs into actions in software. That basic definition doesn’t change according to the problem domain. Whether it’s sending payments from one bank to another, checking a person’s right to work on a government database, or doing something with statistical data about health issues, the programmer’s job is to understand what the user needs and make things happen on a screen.
The big difference for me, I think, will be that in this new role I’ll have the chance to contribute to doing something good in the world. As I said at my interview, I’ve mainly worked in financial software, and while, sure, people need banks, it wasn’t the most socially-usefully thing. The last half-year working at the Home Office had some value, but I was a tiny cog in a huge machine.
At Imperial I’ll be able to feel that I’m actually contributing something useful to society, as well as doing what should be really interesting work.
Oh, and: I’ll be back in Paddington, which I know from my Misys days, and it’s a much shorter commute than to Croydon.
Faces and Feeds
I think I might have to develop an app for reading Facebook the way I think it should work.
There was an article doing the rounds the other week about how “our minds can be hijacked,” which was all about how terrible social networking is for us. I skimmed part of it, but got annoyed when it seemed to be about rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs deciding to go “off-grid.” That’s all very well for them, but most of us have to make a living.
More pertinently, since the main target for the attack was Facebook, it annoyed me because I use Facebook to keep in touch with people that I might otherwise not. For that, it can be very good.
And yet… it struck a chord with, me to some degree. I realised that Facebook has increasingly become more of a time sink than a pleasure. Not that I spend vast amounts of time on it each day, but when I do open it up, I often end up spending longer than I’d have wanted to. And not reading updates from friends and family, but following links to articles and quizzes and nonsense, most of which I wish I hadn’t bothered with.
By comparison, a similar length of time spent in my feed reader lets me read blog pieces by people I actively want to hear from, and which I’m generally glad I’ve read.
But they mostly aren’t friends and family.
And then there’s the fact that the Facebook algorithm is tuned to show me what it thinks I should see, not what I want to see. What I want to see is all the updates from my friends, in reverse-chronological order. And that’s all. But there’s no guarantee that it will show me everything everyone posts, and the order is close to random at times.
One way to work round this is to visit people’s individual Facebook pages. You could see all your the posts by all your friends by going to each of their profiles in turn. But that would mean you’d have to keep track of all that: remember who you visited and when, and somehow manage the list of people.
Keeping track of things is what computers are good at. The software should be doing that for us.
So I’m thinking that what I want is an app that will do that for me: that will keep a list of my Facebook friends, and show me all their posts (which of course is what Facebook used to do).
As far as I know, no such app exists. This seems strange and unlikely, but I don’t think Facebook make a public API available for third-party clients, so such an app would have to work by scraping the web pages, which is neither good practice nor much fun.
Of course, what this means is effectively turning Facebook back into a set of RSS feeds — or now, especially as I have some experience with them, a set of JSON Feed feeds. Which would then be usable in all sorts of other places.
Web scraping may be bad and painful; still, I think I want to write this thing. Watch this space.
The Kickstarter Corporate Communication Conundrum
Today I chanced to see an email in which a manager was asking his staff to work for extra hours. Well, ‘asking’ is putting it generously, to be honest. There didn’t seem to be much that was optional about it.
The Kickstarter connection, though: you’ll be familiar with the idea of ‘stretch goals.’ If not, the idea is that the basic target is to make X amount of money, but if we make X + 10%, or whatever, we’ll be able to do these other things. Develop additional features, make the item in more colours, or whatever. My guess is that the term originally comes from sports.
So this email included in the subject the phrase ‘stretch targets.’ Meaning we want you to do more this week/month/whatever, than we originally planned. It was clearly written by someone who thinks that the way to develop software faster is to work your staff to the bone. When in fact that’s much more likely to result in people taking shortcuts and making mistakes.
In this team they’re already working weekends, and now they’re being ‘stretched’ even more. It bodes ill. But perhaps co-opting the language of positive things for something so negative is worse.
Some Open-Source Software for Your Delectation
I have made a thing, and pushed it out into the world. Well, really, this is me pushing it out into the world, because nobody will have noticed it before now, and with this, there’s a chance they might.
A couple of months ago Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced the existence of JSON Feed, a new syndication format to sit alongside RSS and Atom; but using JavaScript Object Notation or JSON, instead of XML.
They invited people to write parsers and formatters and so on for it, and I quickly realised that no-one had yet written one in Java. As far as I can tell that is still the case. Or at least, if they have, they haven’t made it public yet.
No-one, that is, but me, as I have written just such a thing: a JSON Feed parsing library, written in Java. I’m calling it Pertwee. That’s the product page at my company site (more on which later). It’s open-source, and can be found at Github
As software projects go, it’s not that exciting. But it is the first open-source project that I’ve released. I hope someone might find some use for it.
Wondering why people recruiting for senior development positions often ask low-level JVM type questions. Doesn’t hurt to know that stuff, but who keeps it at their fingertips?
Swim, Test, Shop, Film, Sleep
Yesterday I kind of wilfully skipped a day. At some point in the evening I realised I wasn’t going to write a post, so I just said, “Fine: that’s allowed.”
Today I started by going for a swim. After my new regime of exercise last summer, I got out of the habit once I started a new contract. So it was good to get back to it. (Which is not to say I haven’t swum or gone to the gym in all that time, but it’s been a few weeks at the moment.)
After that I took a HackerRank test for a new job opportunity. It’s a site that does programming tests. This one was, I suspect, a disaster. I hate doing that kind of thing: you’ve got a timer running, and the problem you’re trying to solve is unlike anything you’d have to do professionally… Anyway, suffice to say, it didn’t go terribly well.
This evening was all about falling asleep in front of the telly. We tried to watch 20,000 Days On Earth, the film about Nick Cave from a few years back. I got it a few Christmases or birthdays ago, but hadn’t got round to watching it till now. I enjoyed what I saw of it, but there was definite falling asleep on the sofa and missing chunks. Oh well, it’s a DVD: we can always go back.
Oh yes: there was also a trip to Westfield, the time-void where hours go to die.